Pat Hoffie Hi-Vis

Pat Hoffie, Last Tree Standing 2019, acrylic on canvas, 114 x 105 cm. Courtesy of the Artist. Photography: Louis Lim

PERC TUCKER REGIONAL GALLERY 16 July - 11 September 2022

Publisher Perc Tucker Regional Gallery Townsville City Council PO Box 1268 Townsville City Queensland 4810 galleries@townsville.qld.gov.au ©Galleries, Townsville City Council, and respective artists and authors, 2022 ISBN: 978-0-949461-55-1 Published on the occasion of Pat Hoffie: Hi-Vis Artist Pat Hoffie Publication and Design Development The Hunting House Contributing Authors Jonathan McBurnie Artwork documentation Louis Lim Galleries Team Jane Scott Chloe Lindo Rachel Cunningham Jonathan Brown Ashleigh Peters Tanya Tanner Caitlin Dobson Jo Lankester Sascha Millard Veerle Janssens Leo Valero Michael Favot Katya Venter Zoe Seitis Maddie Macallister Rhiannon Mitchard Wren Moore Danielle Walker

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Acknowledgement of Country Townsville City Council acknowledges the Wulgurukaba of Gurambilbarra and Yunbenun, Bindal, Gugu Badhun and Nywaigi as the Traditional Owners of this land. We pay our respects to their cultures, their ancestors and their Elders, past and present - and all future generations.

Cover image Pat Hoffie, Painting the Landscape 2019, acrylic on canvas, 110 x 108 cm Courtesy of the Artist. Photography: Louis Lim Back image Pat Hoffie, Hi Vis (home building #1) 2018, acrylic on canvas, 107 x 107 cm Courtesy of the Artist. Photography: Louis Lim

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Pat Hoffie, Hi-Vis (monument to Futility) 2019, acrylic on canvas, 114 x 104 cm. Courtesy of the Artist. Photography: Louis Lim

PAT H O F F I E : H I - V I S

Despite the pivot towards an increasingly global marketplace and culture, many notions of ‘Australian-ness’ continue to be associated with manual labour, industry and manufacturing. Hi-Vis brings together works that question the veracity of this enduring myth.

Just as this pivot has radically altered the social and economic strata of the country, the mythology has conversely gained increasing traction. The enduring romance of hard yakka owes much to a form of rhetoric adopted by private school politicians as a shorthand for communicating with (and appealing to) the working class. It operates in a tone-deaf form of accessible soft-nationalism, embedded in a nostalgia for ‘a simpler time’ when everybody was happy to have work, a home and a ‘fair go’. This is itself a fiction and a successful device for obfuscating the contributions (and, essentially, existence) of immigrants and Indigenous Australians from the narrative of work and (as it is often referred to now) ‘nation building’. It is an attempt to rewrite history through rhetoric.

This particular rhetoric, couched in a kind of collective fondness for a general, hard-to-pinpoint post-war sentimentality, is difficult to criticise: to do so would seem to be un-Australian. And so the mythology persists. Comprised of painting and sculptures, Hi-Vis continues Patricia Hoffie’s ongoing artistic explorations which she continues under the ongoing thematic of Fully Exploited Labour.

Hoffie’s exploration teases out notions of safety, and the evolving style (or perhaps anti-style) of safety wear in this context.

The figures inhabiting these complex compositions are decked out in their dayglow orange and neon yellow safetygear, taping off — essentially taming or even colonising— their environment (or, in the parlance of the safety advisor, the site). Hoffie’s recent paintings have been increasingly complex environments, densely populated with structures and

denizens, busily going about their lives.

Hi-Vis seems an apt commentary on the increasing importance placed on health and safety culture by governments and institutions. One cannot help but wonder whether the safety of the individual is actually being protected, or rather the safety of the institution itself, as a response to an increasingly litigious world.

The recent embrace of hi-vis colours in the world of health and safety is interesting in terms of the shift from safety-gearas-practical-protection to safety-gear-as-indicator. Previously workwear was entirely created in the interest of protecting the wearer, whereas now it operates just as much as a signal to passers-by and other workers of the wearer’s presence.

Could this be a technological response to the increasing density of urban living, where the dovetailing of work sites and sites of occupation can no longer be safely-distanced?

Neon, like many compounds now used in pigment, belongs to a fascinating history of discovery, reflecting a technological, as well as artistic, innovation. Discovered in 1898, it took some time before it was capable to mass-produce the colour in a complex process involving cryogenic air separation. But now it is used abundantly in the world of safety for its retina-scorching visibility.

Neon (technically a red-orange colour, though the term ‘neon’ is often applied to other colours) is now used as much as the bold, cadmium-like colours such as yellow, orange and green. For many years, neon was shorthand for the future, an association which is still commonplace: the overpowering advertising and fashions of Bladerunner (1982) and the Fifth Element (1997) are prevalent in popular culture decades after their theatrical release. Neon has also been used, compellingly, as a representation of new modes of perception and reality. The high-key, quasi-infrared colours

Pat Hoffie, Superstructure 2019, acrylic on canvas, 108 x 118 cm. Courtesy of the Artist. Photography: Louis Lim

used in Predator (1987) effectively indicate the titular character’s alien vison, reducing human forms to shifting amorphous blobs of bright reds, blues, yellows and greens. This is a highly effective narrative device, suggesting the existence of a malevolent antagonist stalking its glistening, steroidal prey, while emphasizing its otherness. Tron (1982), and Tron Legacy (2010) are particularly effective in deploying contemporary technologies in order to depict an immersive virtual environ composed of colours and forms that are clearly unencumbered with the practicalities of our own reality. Unlike the virtual world of, say, the Matrix (1999), which is itself a duplicitous simulation of our world (or, technically, the world of 1999; honestly, take me back), Tron represents an imagined reality limited only by the human imagination, rather than the physics of the real world, and its flickering neon geometries.

scaffolding, signage and perimeter tape, dissect and section

In Hoffie’s works, these geometries, which take the form of

of Neo Rauch, Daniel Richter, and even Jonathan Meese. Such

environments with neon cuts of structure and strata. Many of these structures appear highly unstable, especially in relief to the environs they seek to control and subjugate, which appear slightly ominous, if oblivious, in their ancient dormancy. Like the beefcake victims of Predator, the figures within these sectioned, bifurcated environments appear somewhat hapless in their pursuits, unaware of the precariousness of their own situation, despite the safety blanket proffered by their hardware (guns or wacker packer, it makes no difference).

There is also something vaguely Teutonic about Hoffie’s recent works, which appear to be echoing similar tendencies in the work

Pat Hoffie, Moving Upstream 2019, acrylic on canvas, 114 x 179 cm. Courtesy of the Artist. Photography: Louis Lim

connections may appear at first esoteric— the ‘Predator vision’ of Richter’s infrared, almost radioactive colour schemes, Rauch’s apparent obsession with collage and nonsensical vanishing points, and Meese’s chaotic, cathartic mindscapes— but there may be more to this. The undeniable and enduring influence of socialist realism on contemporary German painting is evident in all three artists’ embrace of figurative imagery, rich in narrative portent and a certain kind of Eurocentric iconography. Is it the subjugation of the meadow, or the woods, rather than the scrub and the mangrove, that suggests this? The lush greens into which such industrial cuts and slashes appear so stark and violent?

The ignominy of industry in temperate zones? And does this

Bringing these landscapes back to the European tradition brings this into stark relief. Where notions of 'wilderness' or 'nature' in Europe may be superficially comparable to what used to be referred to as 'the bush', such wilderness was largely a romantic construct, a sort of narrative imaginary by way of nostalgia and cherrypicked historicism (which is in and of itself a highly subjective viewpoint).

translate in the Australian experience, where there is a prevailing misconception that if a place is difficult to inhabit by humans, that

This use of safety-related paraphernalia— the safety helmet, the

there is ‘nothing – or no-one there’? And therefore, are we then

hi-vis vest, the warning tape— continues an enduring commentary

free to dig up resources in places (allegedly and often incorrectly

the artist has had with the politics of work, particularly in regard to

considered as) empty, uninhabited, uninhabitable? The nameless

exploitation of the unregulated labour of workers, many of whom

workers— and they must be workers, because they are outfitted in

have been migrants. However, in the case of Hi-Vis, the specificity

the designated safety gear— of Hoffie’s Hi-Vis works-assemble on

of such unregulated labour (as in Hoffie’s 2006 survey exhibition at

this complicated terrain, which they must traverse and attend to.

the University of Queensland Art Museum, Fully Exploited Labour, or 2013’s You Gotta Love It, exhibited in Artspace Sydney) has

In the face of the often bloody history of Australia’s colonisation, there is laconic bleakness in the national humour, even today, to be found, owing just as much to Indigenous and immigrant voices as to the hubris of discovery, ‘settling’, and ultimately colonisation: so many doomed expeditions, so many avoidable catastrophes. Even in their charting and dividing up of the landscapes, the nameless workers of Hoffie’s Hi-Vis series appear indifferent to, even ignorant of their surroundings, and the folly of their own actions. Says the artist, ‘It seems as though the landscapes behind and within the figures appears more sentient than the human figures [themselves] […] the attempts at avoirdupois - the western way of attempting understanding through measuring and weighing- goes completely askew in these works. Perspective fails’.

Jonathan McBurnie

been replaced by something which grows increasingly universal, at least in terms of Australia and its complicated identity politics.

Contemporary Australia’s lock-step emulation of the litigious mania of the United States has brought with it a predilection for what is oxymoronically refer to as ‘Safety Culture’. While on one hand, Safety Culture could be (and often is) framed as a pragmatic and benign innovation by organisations and institutions, adopted to protect their workers and the public, the reality is, of course, that Safety Culture is actually structured as an adaptation fuelled by the fear of lawsuits. In response, the responsibility for ‘safety’ has been transferred back wholesale to the duty of the individual.

Hoffie’s Hi-Vis paintings were conceptually prefigured by her sculptural Service Industry works. While the sculptures explore many of the themes of the Hi-Vis paintings— particularly considerations of attire and workwear— the brutal subtleties of casual racism are woven into their narrative adaptations. Based on the postwar fashion for hand-made DIY ‘dumb

Pat Hoffie, Bald Rock 2019, acrylic on canvas, 107 x 105 cm. Courtesy of the Artist. Photography: Louis Lim

waiters’—these hall-stands to hold an ash tray are often still found in collections of bric-a-brac. As Hoffie explains, ‘You don't have to be a political brain-box to realise the connections between the facts that these little men were always waiting to serve, were always dressed in livery, and were always black. In the twenty-first century they might seem quaint - even appealing - a reminder of how things were, and an assurance that since the time these 'dumb waiters' were made, things have changed.’

The base of each work describes a brief history of the aspirational nature of each of the manufacturers. Such stories often give glimpses into Australia’s migrant story through the provision of jobs; the efforts to keep jobs and more recently the efforts of these companies to resist the tides of globalised production. In this sense, these narratives are echoed and distorted by the politicised whitewashed narratives discussed earlier, where companies that include Yakka, Golden Circle and Rosella are used easy references to nostalgia for a simple past, while simultaneously erasing the multi-cultural bases of this history. As such, the truths becomes mythologized, and the mythology becomes fictionalised.

As Hoffie explains, ‘The series developed when I started thinking a bit more about the changing nature of the Australian workforce. In the last decade, as manufacturing has ground down to a low ebb in the country, millions of workers have lost their jobs. I looked at just a few of the large companies that had significant manufacturing histories in Australia, and made a little effigy for the workers that had built the reputations of the products that have, in many instances, become closely associated with

Australian identity. Instead of livery, I dressed each of them in the standardised uniform of 'the worker' in Australia - high-vis orange and blue with reflector strips.’

Hoffie’s return to painting has been rightly celebrated. While her sustained engagement with collaborative projects and relational aesthetics scratched a deep social-justice-related itch, Hoffie has always been the master of a compelling and idiosyncratic graphic lexicon. This return has been celebrated in her 2021 Archibald Prize recognition, with her highly commended portrait of her artist daughter, Visaya. This was a moment of lucidity in the famed portrait prize, which in recent years seems to have come to celebrate middling photorealist paint-by-numbers just as often as it does genuine moments of adventurous passages of paint that portray— rather than illustrate— the sitter. The work stood out, ironically, for actually being a painting, rather than a painting trying desperately to be photographic, as is so common.

In conclusion, it should be noted in the discussion of safety gear that the world has been facing a shortage of neon since Russia’s invasion of the Ukraine, which is actually the producer of around 70% of the world’s neon. This may prove a pivotal moment in the world of health and safety and a strange footnote in the history of Ukraine, a country unlikely to be very concerned at present with either health and safety or the world’s neon supply chain.

Once again, we are reminded of the ‘sheer implausibility of building a skyscraper against the endless flat horizon of the oldest continent on earth’, as the artist puts it. We are reminded of the hubris of the safety inspector and their safety tape, cordoning off sections to prevent trips and warn us of uneven ground.

– Jonathan McBurnie